Developers planning more homes in Bend

Published 12:00 am Saturday, January 16, 2016

The developer behind Stone Creek, the 88-acre subdivision on Brosterhous Road, filed with the city of Bend recently to start another phase of the project: 45 townhomes destined for the rental market.

Gary Miller, a principal in Lands Bend Corp., and a former congressman from Diamond Bar, California, said the target market is people content to rent rather than buy a home. The OSU-Cascades campus, now under construction in Bend, may provide tenants when it opens for classes in the fall, he said.

“There’s a new university coming to town; professors and employees will be looking for housing that they don’t necessarily want to buy,” Miller said recently, “or folks who lost a home in the downturn, they don’t necessarily want to buy. We’re catering to that type of user.”

Lands Bend filed an application Dec. 15 with the Bend Community Development Department to divide a 2-acre portion of the property into 45 lots for the townhome project called South Village at Stone Creek. The townhome site is bordered by a planned extension of Brentwood Avenue to the north and a street to be constructed, Whitetail Street, to the east.

The units will range in size from 1,460 square feet to 1,680 square feet, Miller said. The plan is in the early stages of gaining city approval. Estimated rental rates for the units were not available.

Darrin Kelleher, a real estate broker and founder of Franklin Brothers, the builder at Stone Creek, said construction could start this summer, “as soon as we have that phase platted and the building permits.”

Meanwhile, construction of 30 single-family homes in the Stone Creek first phase could begin in February, he and Miller said. Those lots are platted and graded, they said. In total, the Stone Creek plan calls for 600 single-family and multifamily homes, a commercial area, a park and a Bend-La Pine School District school. The school, Silver Rail Elementary, opened in September.

Elsewhere in Bend, SGS Development, of Bend, applied for approval to create 31 lots on 5.31 acres at 2820 NE Faith Drive. If the city approves, SGS Development would prepare the east-side site with streets, water and sewer lines and other infrastructure, then sell the lots, ideally to one homebuilder, said Craig Smith, SGS director of development. If the city approves, SGS Development may break ground in first quarter 2017, he said.

“These lots will average 5,700 square feet, with some potential for single-level, single-family homes,” he said. “That’s the big target market we’re looking at right now.”

SGS Development is also the builder behind a project to erect 136 apartment units in five buildings on Empire Avenue.

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com